Posted on Jul 3, 2012 in Future of News | 2 comments

I am struck by the recent angst over Journatic’s use of fake bylines. The byline business is regrettable, but I wonder how much of the issue is really about the Tribune’s investment in Journatic, and the resulting loss of half the Trib’s hyperlocal staff. The Journatic model of outsourcing “grunt work” to offshore sources will be familiar to anyone who has followed US business trends over the past 20 years. Companies want to stay in business, and even those that aren’t under significant financial pressure will embrace operating efficiencies. The news industry is under terrible pressure–most of it due to digital inaction: an incomprehensible failure or worse, a self-inflicted refusal to sell the new media advertising products that businesses are actually seeking at record levels–and Journatic offers a model that increases inventory while cutting costs. That makes this model all but inevitable. Offshoring has happened across many American business sectors, from manufacturing to knowledge work. Even legal firms are offshoring patent writing and research to India. In the software industry, it is quite a common practice to offshore certain tasks like software quality testing. This was bemoaned by the industry at the onset, and the quality of service started off fairly low, but over the past decade it has become an industry standard. The old argument goes something like this: do American workers really want to do the rote tasks, or do they want to focus on the skilled work? If companies can efficiently cut costs by offshoring the grunt work, those savings can be used to fund innovation back home. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way; sometimes US workers simply lose jobs, the savings are poured into management bonuses, and the product suffers. But just as often when companies forfeit quality, there is a correction as they lose market share and realize they need to improve the product. Hopefully we’ll see that trend in journalism, where consumers should, and do, demand quality reporting. But many in the world of journalism, despite their focus on news, seem to have remarkably little sense of their place in the new world order. The newspaper industry is struggling to stop a...

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